My second Z

This brings me to the point of this here blog. Now that I have a place to work in the back of my house, I decided to take on a new project. After scouring Craigslist for weeks and weeks I found a guy selling a 1982 non-turbo 280ZX 2+2. While, my first Z was just a 2 seater, the nostalgia factor kicked in and I had to have it.






Turns out the guy lives just shy of 200 miles from me so after a couple of phone conversations about it and mailing the guy a deposit, I found myself headed to his small, central Texas town with a car hauling trailer my neighbor graciously allowed me to borrow. 7 hours later, I was back home with my new car. I paid $450 this time, but the car was in very similar condition to my first one when I brought it home.



This car had been, at least attempted, to be worked on by it's previous owner. After getting it home and digging through the boxes in the back hatch area, I realized that he had replaced the spark plugs, wires and distributor. I also noticed that he has removed the injectors and left them in a grocery bag in the passenger side front seat for me. He hadn't bothered to re-install the fuel rail but instead just left it laying in the general vicinity of where it belongs. There is some rust on the body, but I guess that's to be expected with all but the rarest of exceptions of cars this old. The car's inspection sticker saying 1999, so I'm thinking at a full rebuild is in order.



So, there it is. I'm still working on a name, if I can't decide on one I may end up putting up a poll to get input. For now the poll on the right is about what I should do to it. My requirements for when I've got it up and running are as follows:

1. It needs to be reliable. I want to be able to road trip it if I feel so inclined.
2. It needs to look good. Unlike my last Z, I'm going to invest some resources into making sure it looks as good as I do.
3. It needs to be streetable, I want it to run on pump gas and be fully street legal.

My first Z

The first car I ever bought was a 1981 280ZX. I was 18 years old and I bought with $400 I'd raised mowing lawns. Of course for that price you can imagine it wasn't in the greatest shape.

I'll rummage around and see if I can find photos of it somewhere, but it's condition the day I had it towed to the driveway at my parent's house included the following:

1. It didn't run, it turned over but it apparently had over heated causing a warped cylinder head which was common for these cars.
2. It was at least 3 colors, including the original silver, primer gray, and rust brown.
3. The passenger side door make a creaking sound topped of by a loud pop when opened. I attributed it to some shoddy body work from a previous collision.
4. It was the non-turbo version ("NA" for the Z people) and did not have t-tops, which I would later come to regret.
5. It was a 5 speed manual tranny (my non-auto).

Before I bought that car, the only mechanical work I'd ever done was change oil, so to say I was a novice would be an understatement. I went to my local auto parts store and purchased a Haynes repair manual, and set about what I hoped was a relatively simple fix of the warped cylinder head.

Some 200+ man-hours later, dad and I had it purring like a kitten. The journey had taken us to numerous pick-a-parts and junk yards foraging for workable parts on my budget. I ended up getting another warped cylinder head and having a local machine shop weld the cracks and mill it down to flat (I would come to find later that this would have the unintended but nonetheless beneficial side effect of increasing the compression ratio and thus the horsepower of this car.)

I had changed every gasket on the motor, the timing chain, every moving part in the cylinder head, the water pump, oil pump, fuel pump, power steering pump, master cylinder, A/C compressor, brake calipers on all 4 corners, and many other items, the list is long.

In short, it was quite an education and I'm proud to say that when I got the car it had 130K+ miles on it and I put another 60K on it. This would include driving it from Dallas, TX to Los Angeles, CA, with every possession I owned packed into it. It remained my daily driver there for nearly two years.

By the time I'd decided to leave LA and come back to Texas, I'd gotten a new car and had no way of getting the Z back to TX. Not being known for my foresight, I found myself standing in the parking lot of my now empty apartment holding a plane ticket for later that afternoon and a set of keys to the Z I'd grown to love over the last 6 years.

With my back against the wall, I could only come up with one solution. I drove it to Z World in Redondo Beach. Those guys had replaced the drive shaft for me a while back and had commented that although the car didn't look like much, it may have been the fastest all stock 280ZX they could recall driving. (I'm not biased or anything, but I attribute this both to the previously mentioned inadvertent increased compression ratio along with the OCD-like meticulousness with which I made each and every repair on the car).

Back to the story ... I pulled up at the shop and with my suitcase in hand, walked in and talked to the owners. I told them my predicament and they agreed to come look at the car. After walking around it and hearing it run, they immediately launched into the good cop/bad cop routine. With one of them arguing that they have too much inventory already (they had about 2 dozen Zs of different vintages sitting on the lot) while the other kept making the case in his thick Scottish accent, "But it's a runner! He drove it here!" It ended with them finally stopping to look and me and ask, "What do you want for it?" Me, "Look, I hate so show my hand, but I can't leave here with it, so make me an offer." The guy reached in his pocket and handed me two crisp 100 dollar bills. I signed the title and within five minutes was headed to the airport with a Z shaped hole in my heart.